The Year of the Locust, page 5
I was only thirty-six but experience had taught me that salvation often lay in the tiniest details, and I was desperate to discover as much as possible about the terrorist leader. After all, my life might depend on it.
While I was supposed to be sleeping in preparation for the morning’s early call and the start of my journey, I made my way instead across Langley’s sprawling campus to the New Headquarters Building.
The two towers were only six stories high but they were like icebergs—only 10 percent was above the surface—and I approached a bank of elevators that only served the vast subterranean labyrinth and waited while the facial recognition camera confirmed my identity. The car descended twelve floors, the doors opened, and I stepped into the Tomb. More properly known as CIA Archives, Langley—one of the agency’s eight huge data storage facilities—it had earned its nickname not only because it was so far underground but because its files were reputed to hold the key to where countless bodies were buried.
The information held in the facility was notoriously hard to navigate, so I was thankful when I was met at the elevator by Clayton Powell, the chief archivist. Aged in his fifties with a purple birthmark disfiguring a large part of his face—Freud could probably have written volumes about why he had chosen to work so far underground—he was not only excellent at his job but one of the most decent people I had ever met. Highly intelligent, always trying to think laterally, he shook my hand warmly and led me into the labyrinth, heading toward one of the secure cell-like rooms where a hard-backed chair, the relevant files, and a computer with no access to anything except power would be waiting.
“What have you dug up?” I asked as he keyed in the access codes to the cell.
“About al-Tundra? Nothing that hasn’t been pored over a thousand times,” he said, and opened the door.
Three hours later, fighting to stay awake, I was almost at the end of the rows of digital files, every one of them confirming exactly what Clay had told me: there was nothing of use in them, it was just the raw data—the muffled phone intercepts and the unreliable accounts sold by men in back alleys in Cairo—on which the Western spy agencies had built the little they claimed to know about him.
With only three files to go, I accessed the largest of them, its size being the only thing differentiating it from the others. The image that instantly appeared on the screen showed satellite footage of a man in the ruins of a burned-out village with a score of bodies littering the street behind him. He was dressed in ISIS-regulation dark glasses, and his face and body were indistinguishable thanks to the keffiyeh and the loose-fitting robes he was wearing. He could have been any warrior in any of the war zones of Iraq or Syria.
Except, according to the research notes accompanying the footage, a highly regarded local informer, standing several hundred yards from the vehicle, heard three senior jihadis tell other fighters that the man was, in fact, the legendary and mysterious al-Tundra.
I sat forward, looking closely as the video unspooled, and then turned my attention to the notes. They said it had been captured by a satellite targeting the most violent part of Syria, and the date watermarked on it showed it had been taken eight months before the air strike that supposedly killed him. I paused the playback and looked again at him for second after long second. While the screen capture was of no value in identifying him—al-Tundra might as well have been playing cards—my fatigue dropped away. Once more I was in the presence of Abu Muslim al-Tundra, the man from the bleak midwinter.
I hit play; the footage showed him getting into a nondescript Toyota four-wheel drive, and once I had finished reading that section of notes, I shook my head in admiration: a very smart agency analyst had determined—thanks to the depth the Toyota’s tires had sunk into the sand—that the vehicle was carrying a lot of extra weight across its body. Under its filthy paintwork, it was heavily and professionally armored.
The vehicle drove off and I looked at the final few paragraphs of notes: the satellite tracked it for three hours until it lost it in the labyrinth of tiny alleys and hidden garages that peppered Mosul, a chaotic city of almost two million people. So that was it, I told myself—one glimpse of al-Tundra, identified by hearsay, and the whole night’s work added nothing to my scant knowledge of the man.
It had been a worthless exercise, and even though I had two more files to look at, I knew they would be of no more value than the scores that had preceded them and I abandoned them completely. I got to my feet, flexed my aching back, and reached for a buzzer on the desk that would signal to Clay that I was finished and he could unlock the door.
I stopped—my action so sudden that my hand froze in midair. A thought had struck me, but where it had come from, or if it would work, I had no idea. I turned and hit the buzzer. I wasn’t leaving, though—I needed Clay’s help.
CHAPTER 13
Clay smiled in greeting and indicated the digital files. “Like I said—thin as paint, huh?”
“Maybe,” I replied.
He looked at me quizzically and then noticed the image of al-Tundra on the screen. “I remember pulling that file scores of times when we were searching for him, ages before he was killed.” He looked at me for a long moment. “He’s not dead, is he?”
I was surprised. “Why would you say that?” I asked, not wanting to answer but unwilling to lie, especially to him.
“Because you’re a Denied Access Area agent, because those files have been gathering dust for years and in the last twenty-four hours they have been accessed seven times, and—finally—because if the Pentagon says you’re dead, you are almost certainly alive.”
I laughed. “Yes,” I said at last. “It looks like he’s alive.”
Clay didn’t react to the news but his expression told me he appreciated the honesty. “I said maybe the files weren’t as thin as paint,” I explained. “We might be able to find something deep down if you want to try. But it’s right outside of the box.”
He smiled. “Well, you’ve come to the best place.” He walked to the corner of the cell, grabbed another of the straight-backed chairs, and sat down.
“I leave tomorrow,” I explained. “There’s no time to get the seventh floor involved in this, even if anyone thought the idea might work. Do you recall what it said in the file? They followed al-Tundra’s vehicle for three hours.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Clay said. “Something went wrong, didn’t it? Something weird.”
“Sure did,” I replied. “They couldn’t missile him, they had only just gotten a positive ID, so they wanted a recording of his voice—the notes say the NSA used every piece of technology they had. If they could just get a sample of him speaking, they could compare it to the countless recordings the satellites were harvesting every day. Once they got a match, we would know exactly where al-Tundra was and what he was talking about.”
“But they never got the recording, did they?” Clay said.
“According to the file, the moment he got in the car he fell asleep. During the entire trip he never said a word.”
Clay and I smiled bitterly. “I remember,” Clay said. “People mentioned at the time it was a complete bust.”
“But it wasn’t,” I responded. “They did have a voiceprint—it was just nobody realized it.”
“What?” Clay replied. “You said he was asleep for the whole journey.”
“He was—but the vehicle wasn’t,” I said. “After three hours of driving they had a perfect voiceprint of the Toyota’s engine.”
“How would that help?” Clay said, laughing, dismissing it. “There must have been a million Toyota four-wheel drives in the cauldron.”
“But how many were fully armored?” I responded. “Four, five? Maybe less. The engine would have been laboring to power that extra weight, sending out an entirely different note.”
Clay was silent, looking at me. “You want us to search the recordings from the zone but not worry about voices—we try to match the sound of an engine?”
“The technology’s the same, Clay,” I said. “Al-Tundra was a founder of ISIS and that was his battle truck. He had to be protected; he won’t be traveling in anything else. We match the sound of the car and I think we’ll hear him talking inside.”
CHAPTER 14
Silently I roamed the back office of the Tomb, a huge space behind the cell-like rooms, walking between the computers in front of forty men and women. Wearing headphones, they were listening to the occupants of a vehicle that—thanks to the distinct tone of its engine—had been identified as the battle truck.
Clay had used AI to trawl through mountains of archived satellite surveillance of the cauldron in the period before al-Tundra was supposedly killed, and our unique system had found countless instances of the armored truck on the move. It then became a matter of listening to the men inside the vehicle and trying to work out—through the content of the conversation—who was the leader, which of them was al-Tundra.
Initially, my hopes had soared, but after two hours reality had intruded. Even hearing the occupants was problematic: the voices were often muffled, if the air conditioner was blasting their words were frequently indistinguishable, and then—of course—there was the sound of small-arms fire and explosions as the vehicle passed through various war zones. Worse still, the material that we did hear was almost entirely trivial: gossip, complaints about food, discussions about logistics and supplies, the fastest route from Raqqa to Mosul. Talk about the banality of evil, I thought.
Finally, despondent, I walked over to Clay. “Time to stop,” I said. “This isn’t going anywhere.” I had a plane to catch. Clay nodded but before he could give the order, an archivist on the far side of the room called out. “Clay,” the long-haired guy in his twenties said in a monotone. “You might want to listen here.”
Clay stared at him for a moment, then took my shoulder and started to guide me fast toward the terminal. “Come on,” he said. “You may want to pay attention to this one.”
I had no idea what he was talking about—certainly there was nothing in the young guy’s tone that indicated he had found something out of the ordinary. Clay saw the confusion on my face and smiled.
“There’s always more than a touch of robot in Darren’s voice,” Clay explained. “Five years he has been with us and that’s the most excited I’ve ever heard him.” He called out to the young archivist as we crossed the room toward him. “What is it, Darren?”
“Four guys in the battle truck,” Darren said. “Must have been a nice day—windows closed, air conditioner low, no gunfire, a long journey by the size of the file. Lot of talking…”
What a strange guy, I thought. Clay and I arrived at his side. One half of his computer screen was dominated by multicolored bar graphs and the other half was showing a written translation in English, scrolling fast as it kept up with the spoken words. I started reading but Darren interrupted. “They have just left a village where a dozen families had been burned alive in their houses—intentionally or by accident, nobody is saying.”
Darren had clearly never dealt with ISIS if he thought it could have been accidental. “What language?” I asked.
“Gulf Arabic,” he replied, as flat as ever.
“Through the speakers, please.”
Darren glanced at me. Gulf Arabic is difficult to master but I have always had a gift for languages. When I was young I started off with Russian and pretty soon hit the harder stuff—Turkish and the two most popular forms of Arabic. Over the years I had improved until I was fluent enough to withstand almost any scrutiny.
Darren shrugged. “Whatever you say, mister.”
He brought the sound up and for the first time I heard the voices. Inspired probably by burning families alive in their homes, they were beginning to discuss other cruel things they had witnessed. I stepped closer to the screen, looking at the image of the Toyota, and told Darren to concentrate on whoever was sitting in the rear, on the passenger side.
“That’s the safest seat,” I explained. “The armor is always strongest at the back and anyone targeting them will aim at the driver and his side of the vehicle.”
Darren tweaked his controls, enhancing the clarity. The man in the safe seat started to speak, invisible behind his dark-tinted window. I closed out the rest of the world and focused on his voice. The other archivists started to gather round but I paid them no mind; I just kept listening to the voice, going deeper until I felt like the man was talking to me.
“Whoever he is,” I said, “Gulf Arabic isn’t his native language but he’s good, very good—he’s been in the cauldron a long time. As you can see on the translation, the driver is asking the men about their experiences, the most terrible things they have witnessed—”
I stopped in midsentence as I listened to a burst of byplay between the four men, trying to imagine the body language, the behavior, all the nonverbal things that communicate so much. Then suddenly I straightened myself and signaled to Darren to stop the tape.
I continued to stare at the frozen image of the Toyota—I was certain of it, and I exhaled, not even aware until then I had been holding my breath. “The man in the safe seat is him,” I said. “You won’t get it from the translation but listen to the other three, the pauses, their tone—they are deferring to him. He’s their commander, it’s his battle truck.”
For the first time ever, a US intelligence agent had heard the voice of the legendary Abu Muslim al-Tundra, and I turned to Darren. “Hit play,” I said. “Let’s listen to him.”
CHAPTER 15
“I heard a story once about a teenager,” al-Tundra said, making his contribution to the group’s accounts of horror. “He was raised in a mining town on the frontier, one of those places where, as somebody said, the streets were dark with something more than night.
“It was a place of terrible winters, endless forests, and a huge river. As if life wasn’t hard enough, the boy and his brother—four years younger—had no mother. When they were young, the parents separated, and the mother took their two daughters and returned to Iraq, where she had grown up.
“It must have been very hard, but the boys’ father never faltered,” al-Tundra continued. “He gave everything to his boys, acting as mother and father in that brutal environment, and as they grew older, they not only loved him but admired him without reservation.”
Al-Tundra paused and it took me a moment to realize that he was drinking. “The father worked underground in one of the dirtiest and most dangerous diamond mines in the world,” he said. “But in late spring every year, once the snow had melted, he would put his sons in his old four-wheel drive, hitch up a trailer, and load it with a tent, weapons, tools, and enough supplies for at least four months.
“They would drive for days through the forest until they entered an area of bogs and endless plains. Once they arrived, they would set up camp and start to search for woolly mammoths.”
CHAPTER 16
“Did he say woolly mammoths?” Clay asked, signaling to Darren to stop the tape. He laughed. “How long have woolly mammoths been extinct?”
“Five, ten thousand years, I’m not sure,” I answered. “I don’t think the father’s looking for the animals, though—he’s looking for their carcasses.”
Clay and the rest of the group stopped laughing. I was forbidden to say anything about past missions, so I couldn’t tell them how I knew, but as a Denied Access Area spy fluent in the language, I had been to Russia six or seven times. Once, on a train journey halfway across the country, I had heard about a strange and highly lucrative business. “The woolly mammoth miners of Siberia are sort of legendary,” I said.
Everybody, including Clay, looked at me. “For over five million years, Siberia was home to massive herds of mammoths,” I continued. “The animals were born and lived in the vast landscape, and when they died their bodies sank into the earth and bogs, slowly decaying until all that remained were the ivory tusks, impervious to soil, water, or time.
“That last remnant of them would have stayed there,” I said. “Undisturbed forever, if not for the wildlife poachers of Africa. By hunting elephants and rhinos almost to extinction, they finally forced the world to act and ban the trade in ivory. The biggest casualty was the specialists in Hong Kong who made a good living carving elaborate scenes of village life into a tusk. Highly prized in China for the craftsmanship and as a status symbol, they often went for more than a million bucks.
“Without any tusks, the old craft and the entire business was finished—until somebody realized that ivory recovered from the bogs of Siberia was legally clean. The mammoth tusks exploded in value and men on the frontier soon learned that one tusk could sell for the equivalent of five years’ wages. If the miners were lucky and hit what they called a graveyard—a site with four or more dead animals—they could earn a fortune in a few days and escape Siberia forever.”
I shrugged. “The mammoth miners are real.” I nodded to Darren to restart the tape and once again we heard al-Tundra’s voice.
“It was during their fifth journey into the wilderness—the boy was sixteen and his brother was twelve—when they hit it big,” he said. “They were up to their armpits in mud, using a generator and high-pressure water guns to blast into the soft earth on the bank of a small river when the young boy saw the first tusk.
“The three of them tore and ripped at the soil with their bare hands. The tusk and its partner were huge, but that was not the best of it—within ten yards, they located four other animals. The father and his two boys had found a graveyard.
